CAA News Today
Google Books Settlement
posted by Christopher Howard — November 09, 2009
Today is the deadline for a revised settlement agreement to be filed in response to a lawsuit by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, who are protesting the unauthorized copying of in-copyright books by Google.
CAA has prepared a summary article on the Google Library Book Project to better inform you about the issues at stake; included are a brief description of aspects of the settlement and links to articles and editorials from authors and reporters supporting or criticizing the settlement.
CAA’s constituency includes both creators and users of books. The Committee on Intellectual Property has taken up the matter for consideration and is currently considering what position, if any, to recommend.
November CAA News Published
posted by Christopher Howard — November 06, 2009
The November issue of CAA News, your critical guide to life in the worlds of art and academia, has just been published. You may download a PDF of the issue immediately.
On the cover is not a long-lost Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock at work—it’s a detail of a sculpture by Joe Fig that’s part of the CAA Annual Exhibition, Picturing the Studio. Read an excerpt from the catalogue essay for this important group show, which opens next month in Chicago and will be on view during the CAA Annual Conference.
The newsletter also contains an interview with the creators of Smarthistory, a multimedia art-history website with innovative ideas for supplementing the Western survey class, as well as an article about this fall’s hot intellectual-property topic, the Google Books settlement. You can also check out the latest details about the upcoming conference, browse listings of recent solo exhibitions and books published by CAA members, and much more.
For submissions to the January issue, please review the CAA News guidelines. Questions? Contact Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor.
New Industry Report by NAMTA on Artists and Art Materials
posted by Christopher Howard — November 03, 2009
A recent study on artists and their materials has been published by the International Art Materials Trade Association (known as NAMTA) and American Artist magazine, in conjunction with Hart Business Research. Based on a spring 2009 survey of artists, students, and the retailers and suppliers of art materials, “Artists & Art Materials USA 2009” is the first report published in over a decade that analyzes industry size and trends, business practices, and artist needs.
The most groundbreaking finds published in this report include an increased use of mixed media and digital media, the importance of arts education for both children and practicing artists, and the continued use of magazines and books as a primary source of learning. The results of the survey show that artists are purchasing larger amounts of “nontraditional” art materials such as fabrics, glass, and beads, using more digital products, and incorporating scavenged materials. In 2008, the percentage of artists spending for nontraditional art supplies was almost equal to that for paints.
Unsurprisingly, the study found that artists are increasingly using computers either to create digital art or to assist them in producing nondigital art. However, many artists favor printed materials such as art magazines to their website counterparts as a source for education. Eighty-seven percent of survey participants said they read art-related magazines, making these publications the top source for learning, followed closely by books. Early exposure to art is crucial: well over half of the professional artists who participated in the survey responded that art was a major part of their lives by age 12. The report urges for the support of elementary school art teachers in order to expose children to art at a young age.
The 4.4 million active artists in the United States—professionals, students, and hobbyists—are spending over $4 billion per year on art materials and services. While 28 percent of artists buy their supplies online, almost twice as much shopping (54 percent) occurs at brick-and-mortar businesses. Also, while stores are meeting artists’ need for drawing and painting supplies, an increasing number of practitioners are spending more for classes and workshops, an area underserved by retailers and suppliers.
A free download of the eight-page executive summary is available from NAMTA.
Fall 2009 Art Journal Published
posted by Christopher Howard — October 21, 2009
In her editor’s introduction to the Fall 2009 issue of Art Journal, Judith Rodenbeck discusses a text by Erwin Panofsky that she relates to the current interest in reenactment. Making a further connection to the four essays and the roundtable discussion in the current issue, she suggests that “Panofsky’s insistence on the detailed and intertwined study of form, content, and context here bears reconsideration, albeit under the revised skies of our own time.”
In “Imperious Griffonage,” Hajime Nakatani explores the role of the Chinese written character in the work of the artist Xu Bing and several of his contemporaries, finding that both the standard script characters and Xu’s inventive pseudocharacters show curious signs of a life of their own. In an essay that contextualizes Jo Baer’s paintings and writing of the late 1960s, Patricia Kelly accentuates the artist’s innovative exhibition strategies, intended to engage the viewer in a participatory manner.
Jane McFadden writes about the art of Walter de Maria in “Earthquakes, Photoworks, and Oz,” focusing first on his photoworks of the 1960s and then on his best-known work, The Lighting Field, and its mediation through photography. In her essay on the reception of Louise Bourgeois’s 1964 Stable Gallery exhibition, Elyse Speaks examines the consistency of the artist’s treatment of themes of the body and the home.
Art Journal assembled an expert panel of scholars for a critical discussion of the promises and pitfalls of transcultural exchange in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, a 2009 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Alexandra Munroe, the chief curator of the exhibition, responds.
In the Reviews section of this issue, Clark Buckner considers three recent books on curatorial and exhibition practice, Marc James Léger examines two books about art and activism, and Soraya Murray evaluates two books on new-media art.
New Report Compares Virtual-Gallery Software
posted by Christopher Howard — October 20, 2009
Technology in the Arts has published a free report, entitled Virtual Gallery Software Review, that reviews and compares three software applications—Virtual Galleries, Image Armada, and SceneCaster/3D Scenes—designed to help artists, curators, and art organizations create three-dimensional virtual exhibitions. This type of technology can provide not only a useful alternative experience for audiences that cannot physically attend a live exhibition, but it can also potentially help students and professionals learn about exhibition planning and installation.
The task of building virtual galleries or exhibitions can often be daunting and costly. Despite software that facilitates the development of virtual environments for conferences, commercial expos, and education, solutions for creating virtual art exhibitions have been scarce. For these reasons, two important criteria for the study were ease of use and user-friendly design. The primacy of these criteria also prompted the researchers to exclude Second Life because of its steep learning curve for environment creation.
Researchers looked for five features desirable in an application used by artists and arts professionals: ease of creating an exhibition; quality of images; flexibility of creating an exhibition; ease of navigation in the three-dimensional space; and ease of publishing or distributing the gallery. The report contains individual descriptions of the three applications, as well as comparisons of their features, such as Mac and PC compatibility, hardware requirements, internet-based viewing, and image and lighting manipulation.
Technology in the Arts, an organization that explores the intersection of arts management and technology, offers services such as consulting, professional-development training, webinars, an online resource directory, monthly podcasts, and a discussion-based blog. It is part of the Center for Arts Management and Technology, an applied research center at Carnegie Mellon University exploring ways in which arts managers can employ online technologies to meet their organizational goals and engage audiences more effectively.
Should Libraries Toss Their Old Print Journals? A New Report on Digitizing Library Collections
posted by Christopher Howard — October 06, 2009
Many journals are sufficiently preserved digitally and housed in print repositories so that some libraries can responsibly withdraw their own print holdings, according to a new report published by Ithaka S+R. Written by Roger Schonfeld and Ross Housewright, “What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization” takes a system-wide approach to the needs of libraries and their users collectively, rather than focusing on regions, systems, or consortia.
“Libraries are right to push aggressively into the digital future but should do so with an awareness about risk and tradeoffs,” said Housewright, an analyst at Ithaka S+R, the strategy and research arm of the nonprofit organization ITHAKA, which is also the parent company of JSTOR and Portico.
Looking at reasons for retaining and preserving physical copies of scholarly journals, “What to Withdraw” proposes minimum time periods that require libraries to give access to both print and digital versions. It then offers a minimum number of required print copies to retain. Based on this analysis, the report concludes that certain print journal backfile sets are well enough digitized and contain few enough images that it is unlikely there will be future demand for them by users.
Some print materials, the authors warn, may not yet be ready for broad withdrawal without risk. For these materials, several strategies are recommended to give libraries more flexibility. First, organizations responsible for digitization programs should provide more transparency on the quality of their digitization work and participate in ongoing efforts to upgrade the quality of their scans. In addition, libraries should form deeper partnerships with publishers and other digitizers.
“There is an opportunity before us to make a system-wide impact on print collection management,” said Housewright, “but in order to do so libraries and digitizers need to commit to collaboration at a level unseen today.”
Resources for Catalogues Raisonnés and for Art Law and Cultural Property
posted by Christopher Howard — September 24, 2009
The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a nonprofit educational and research organization dedicated to integrity in the visual arts, has launched two important resources for the art community on its recently expanded and redesigned website: the Catalogue Raisonné Database and Art Law and Cultural Property.
The Catalogue Raisonné Database comprises two integrated electronic databases—one for published catalogues raisonnés, the other for catalogues in preparation—that can be searched individually or in unison. IFAR asks anyone who is aware of a published or in-preparation catalogue raisonné not included in our database (currently at more than two thousand entries) to contact the organization by clicking on the link “Tell Us about Catalogues Raisonnés” and completing the electronic form.
Art Law and Cultural Property helps users to navigate the mushrooming and complex body of legislation and case law relating to the acquisition, ownership, and authenticity of art objects. The website has two principal components: International Cultural Property Ownership and Export Legislation, with texts in original language and English translation from, currently, more than eighty countries; and Case Law and Statutes, with summaries of legal cases in eight subject areas relating to IFAR’s fields of interest. A section on professional guidelines, a glossary, and images are also included.
These two double the offerings from IFAR’s current online educational resources, which also include Provenance Guide and Collectors’ Corner. CAA maintains its own website resource, Intellectual Property and the Arts.
September CAA News Published
posted by Christopher Howard — September 16, 2009
The September CAA News has just been published. All individual and institutional members may download the PDF from the CAA website.
Inside you’ll find early information about the upcoming Annual Conference. Among the special events for Chicago is a keynote address by the renowned photographer Dawoud Bey, who will speak at Convocation. In addition, the painter Phyllis Bramson has been named one of two artists to be interviewed in ARTspace.
Also included in the issue are details about two conference mentoring sessions—the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring—as well as an interview with Jackie Battenfield, the author of the recently published book, The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love.
The September newsletter is the second in our return to a digital-only format. The layout has been changed to better fit your computer screen, and all images are now in color. If you prefer to read a hard copy, printed pages are clear and readable.
Submissions to the Endnotes section of the November CAA News are due by September 30; please review the guidelines before sending your listing. Questions or concerns? Please contact Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor.
Deadline for the Wyeth Book Grant Extended
posted by CAA — September 08, 2009
The deadline for the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005 with funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, has been extended to Friday, October 9, 2009.
The Wyeth grant supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For purposes of the program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico prior to 1970.
For more information, please contact Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate, at 212-691-1051, ext. 254.
Image: John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, 1768, oil on canvas, 35 1/8 x 28 1/2 in. Gift of Joseph W. Revere, William B. Revere and Edward H. R. Revere, 1930. 30.781 (artwork in the public domain)
September 2009 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — September 02, 2009
The September 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.
Five articles make up the issue. Leading off is Rachel Kousser’s “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis,” which argues that in the way it was commemorated, the Persians’ sack of the Acropolis in 480 BCE took on paradigmatic significance as an example of “Oriental violence.” Next is a text by Elena Boeck, who in “Simulating the Hippodrome: The Performance of Power in Kiev’s St. Sophia” analyzes strategies of display, appropriation, and simulation of Byzantine imperial symbols by Prince Iaroslav “the Wise” in the paintings of the hippodrome in Kiev’s St. Sophia.
In “Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity,” Lynn F. Jacobs interrogates the miraculous thresholds of this work by Peter Paul Rubens, which negotiate relations between the donors and God and between the meanings inherent in the life and theology of Christ. Her essay is followed by “Nature and the Ideal in Khnopff’s Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses,” in which Brendan Cole examines the work of Fernand Khnopff from an iconographic perspective to reveal how the central concerns for all Symbolist artists—of duality and the reconciliation of opposites—are encoded in his paintings.
Last, Phoebe Wolfskill’s “Caricature and the New Negro in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden” evaluates the perplexing appearance of racial caricature in compositions by these two “New Negro” Renaissance painters and considers how pervasive stereotypes might inform self-perception. Hayden’s Nous quatre à Paris from ca. 1930 is the cover image for this issue.
Also included are seven reviews of books on Romanesque Partheny, Castilian culture, Inigo Jones, Utamaro, science in art, and more. Please read the full table of contents for more details.